"Everything is so fragile. There's so much conflict, so much pain...you keep waiting for the dust to settle and then you realize this is it; the dust is your life going on. If happy comes along—that weird, unbearable delight that's actual happy—I think you have to grab it while you can. You take what you can get, 'cause it's here, and then...gone."

Chapter 1

(27 days until V-day)

"It's not as hard as you're making it out to be," Dwayne said, exasperated. It was hard to tell, but for him it was exasperated.

Missy threw her hands up and let her arms fall dramatically against her thighs with a loud slap. "It's flying, Dwayne." She yanked on the brim of the soft, worn teal Seattle Mariners baseball cap she was wearing with both hands, folding the brim like a rolled up newspaper. "If it was easy, everyone could do it."

"Everyone can do it," Dwayne said pointedly.

Missy sighed with her palate. She reached up and took off her baseball cap, tightened her ponytail, then replaced it with her bangs tucked underneath. It was supposed to keep her hair out of her face, Dwayne's idea, and whether it really helped at all her remained to be seen because all it had done so far was make her sweat. "Vampires aren't everyone, Dwayne." She was wearing a mustard yellow thrift store tee shirt that said: "Michigan: State of Champions" on the front and matching bruises on her knees and ass. Her knees were scuffed and there was dried blood on the edges of the holes in her jeans.

Obviously, her flying lessons were going great.

"Laddie can do it."

Laddie's giggle was drowned out by the constant clicking of the Rubik's cube in his hands. Three days and the only side he'd completed was the one she did for him and even that had taken her the better part of an entire night.

"Is this how David motivated you to learn how to fly?" She furrowed her eyebrows, pouting. "Because it's making me feel like crap." Dwayne went to the Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim school of motivation like David. Hurting her feelings and her backside was all he'd done, but no one said being a vampire was supposed to be easy.

That's not true. Paul said it was easy, like a hundred times.

"Why do you gotta make everything into math homework?"

"What?"

"More complicated than it has to be, brains."

That was a direct quote, and if Paul was calling her out for making things harder than they had to be of all people, maybe that was a sign she was doing something wrong. I mean, the bruises on her backside said that too.

"You want to see how David taught us?" Dwayne asked.

"Wait, no, Dwayne—" he grabbed her by the waist and flipped her over his shoulder, knocking the wind out of her. The brim of her cap hit his back and her cap popped off like the head of a dandelion under her thumbnail. It swung from her ponytail and fell off completely, landing in the dirt. "Dwayne!" She pushed on his back, turning her head and torso around like she was hanging upside down from the monkey bars. The Pacific wind was more violent the closer they got to the edge of the bluff. Her heart dropped into her mouth like Connect Four, and not just because she was upside down. The wind blew her hair into her mouth, "Dwayne!" her breath hitched. "You made your point. This isn't funny."

"I almost made my point," Dwayne said. He grabbed her by the ankles and lifted her legs so she slipped off his shoulder, holding her up effortlessly as if she weighed nothing at all.

"Dwayne," Laddie said nervously, looking over his shoulder in the direction of the wooden steps that led down to the cave under the bluff.

"You're too close to the point to miss the rocks."

Her lungs wouldn't expand all the way hanging upside down, it was like trying to breathe with Dwayne sitting on her stomach. "Dwayne," she gasped.

"Think happy thoughts, Missy."

"Dwayne, I can't swim!"

The expectation of drowning was optimistic, she thought. That was only if she missed the rocks, which as Dwayne pointed out was unlikely given her current trajectory. What was likely was that she'd die. Her body would be smashed on the rocks like a baby bird, her brief life as a half-vampire cut shorter because Dwayne couldn't take a joke.

She banged her elbow on the cliff face so hard she thought she broke it, throwing her arms out as if she could slow her descent that way. "Dwayne!" She tried to scream but the rushing air went down her throat and punched her in her empty stomach.

Happy thoughts, Missy.

"Dwayne!"

She couldn't see how close she was getting to the ground, every time she tried to look it was like trying to lift her head off the headrest on a roller coaster: impossible.

Dwayne wasn't going to let her die. Not like this, not after breaking all of the vampire societal rules like Ponyboy Curtis to save her life. He wouldn't risk pissing off Max and David by saving her just to turn around and throw her off a cliff a few weeks later, not even to prove a point.

She kept waiting for the punchline to hit. Or the ground.

But she didn't hit the rocks, or the water. She did hit something, though.

She should've known it was Dwayne right away because it felt like a truck hit her in the air. It still knocked the wind out of her when they caught her when she tripped, which still happened way too frequently, and nine times out of ten it was David who caught her because he always seemed to be around when she embarrassed herself, like a shark drawn to her shame in the water.

"You're really dramatic," Dwayne said. "anyone ever told you that?"

"You're a sociopath!" Missy would have punched him if she could physically take her hands off of him to do so. Dwayne held them both up in the air like they were treading water in a swimming pool and he was teaching her how to swim, which she had little context for because she didn't know how to swim and there weren't that many public pools in Queen Anne, but she remembered floating like this with her dad when she was five. Almost drowning put future lessons on permanent hiatus, and after her mother's second attempt, she couldn't even take a bath, let alone submerge herself completely. It was manageable these days. She didn't hyperventilate or cry if she got near water, which was a far cry from how she was twelve years and pre-therapy ago. She still couldn't take baths though.

"You're fine," Dwayne said. The arm holding her up cut into her lower back like a seatbelt.

"I am not fine." She kicked him as hard as she could with their legs dangling. "I could have died."

"You weren't even close."

"I could have had a heart attack!"

Dwayne very nearly laughed. "You're seventeen. I don't know many seventeen-year-olds that die of heart attacks."

Missy huffed. "With my luck, I'd be the first."

Dwayne half smiled. "Yeah, you're probably right."

Missy kicked her legs like she was trying to fix her covers without touching them. "Is that really how David taught you how to fly?"

Dwayne shrugged. "What do you think?"

"I think David's a sociopath." Dwayne laughed. Missy bit the inside of her cheek thoughtfully. "You know, the whole concept of sink or swim has been proven to actually be kind of counterproductive, not to mention dangerous, especially when it comes to flying!"

"We all swam," Dwayne said mildly.

Missy pursed her lips to the side. "Did you really let David throw Laddie off a cliff?"

Dwayne smiled roguishly. "No."

Missy didn't think so. Star, on the other hand, she would have paid to see David throw off a cliff, just to see the look on her face when he caught her.

Dwayne huffed. "Me too."

"Is it really not supposed to be this hard?" Missy asked. "Flying, I mean."

Dwayne shrugged again,

"I can't fly, I can't hear anyone else's thoughts but mine," Missy sighed, tightening her ponytail absently. "I must be the world's worst half-vampire." She picked up her baseball cap and smacked it against her thigh, shaking the dirt off. Laddie ran up to her and hugged her, the Rubik's cube stabbing her in the lower back. She swept his long hair out of his face with one hand and put her baseball cap on him. He giggled when she tugged on the brim, covering his eyes.

He tilted his head back, holding the top of her baseball cap so it wouldn't fall off his head. "Did you fly?"

Missy huffed. "No, Dwayne caught me again." The bruises on her legs and backside were a testament to just how ineffective a running start was when it came to flying, and jumping out of a tree, which sounded like a good idea in her head, was not any better than her previous attempts in practice. Luckily Dwayne caught her before she could hurt herself any more than she already had, putting the kibosh on her solo flight plans. It was probably a good thing he did, otherwise, she'd have more than bruises on her backside to show for it.

She didn't even want to be a vampire in the first place, but it was discouraging nonetheless that she couldn't even seem to conquer the basics. She didn't expect to be good at everything vampire right away, but she didn't expect to be bad at everything either.

"You're thinking about it too much," Dwayne said.

"Thank you," Missy said tartly. "that really helps me, Dwayne, thank you." Things had been better between her and Dwayne ever since Max let them off the hook for Patrick's death. She could tell that Dwayne was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, but she'd been making an effort to move past it, and make the best of the bad situation she found herself in, even if she hadn't technically forgiven him, for the sake of peace, even if it was just her own peace of mind. She hadn't had much these past few weeks, of peace, that is, which wasn't Dwayne's fault either because she still hadn't told him about Patrick.

Patrick was dead, but no matter how many times she told herself that, she didn't really believe it. She was there when he died, she torched him herself, and even if he could have survived that, there's no way he could survive being turned into Hamburger Helper. But the fact remained that Patrick had been with her since he died.

"A part of me is gonna be inside you always, sweetheart." Missy clenched her jaw, but she couldn't get away from him without touching him, and touching him would be like acknowledging that he was really there.

"Who says I'm not?" Patrick pinched her cheek so hard her right eye closed. "You're not exactly the most reliable narrator, babe. And that stake went through both of us, remember?"

Maybe Patrick was right. When she died, she had Patrick's blood inside her, and now she was a half-vampire. Did that make Patrick her vampire dad or Dwayne? She needed vampire sex-ed. She didn't know how any of this worked, and she didn't know if she was embarrassed to tell Dwayne about her hallucinations like she just figured out how to masturbate, or afraid that he'd tell her she wasn't imagining it at all. At this point, she didn't even know what she thought, but Patrick planted the idea in her head and she couldn't let it go. Her mother was crazy too, maybe she inherited more than just her dimples.

Dwayne was right, she did think too much.

"What are you thinking about, Missy?" Laddie held her hand and swung their arms lightly.

Dwayne caught the panicked look on her face before she could mask it and gave her a strange look.

"Like Dwayne said." She swung their arms harder, making Laddie's shoulder go up and down. He laughed. "Happy thoughts."

RAYMOND

Concord, California

(83 miles outside of Santa Carla)

It would be an hour and a half before they reached Santa Carla and already —"An hour and twenty-seven minutes.", an hour and twenty-seven minutes, thank you, LYDIA, and already Raymond felt uneasy. This was news to no one who knew him, Raymond was usually on edge, it was the only reason he'd lived this long, but he hadn't felt fear like this in a long time.

To call this a suicide mission would be to drastically underplay the gravity of the situation. He fully expected all three of them to die, but probably Luther first. The vampire sitting behind them, a dark-skinned man in his very late thirties or early forties, with a broad hooked nose and a shaved head, and the personality of a lamb chop, didn't comment, and Raymond preferred it that way. He didn't bring Luther with him for the conversation, that much was obvious to anyone who looked at him. If it had been left up to him he wouldn't have come at all, but he definitely wouldn't have brought Luther of all people. Lydia, he could take or leave, but he didn't even know Luther personally, and he didn't like putting his life in anyone's hands, least of all someone he didn't even know from Adam. Why Simon picked him wasn't a mystery, he was 6'4" and as wide as he was tall, he wasn't here to provide shade. The upside of having Lydia with him was at least he didn't have to sit next to Luther or anyone else on the bus.

Lydia was an asshole. That wasn't an indictment of her personally, Raymond thought most people were, especially vampires, but Lydia was basically a Trapper Keeper with great legs, which was fine if he needed someone to memorize a bus schedule or nitpick his inner monologue, but in a fight? Which to be fair, was what he was expecting when they got there, but let's be honest, it wasn't going to be a fight, it was gonna be a slaughter, and there was more of Luther to hack through than there was Lydia. She didn't get where she was in Park's merry gang of psychopaths because of her good lucks —Raymond glanced sidelong at her, obviously, and he was too smart to underestimate her and too smart to think he was infallible, but that didn't mean he trusted her or even liked her either for that matter, which was hardly a surprise, he didn't really like anyone.

He liked public transportation even less, but he didn't pay for the ticket, and he didn't have a license (nor could he reach the pedals even if he wanted to), so he wasn't allowed to complain.

That didn't appear to be stopping him, but he was riding on a bus full of coughing humans toward his almost certain death, so he believed he was entitled.

Simon and the others may have thought he was exaggerating, that's fine, Luther and Lydia may not believe him either for all he knew, he didn't really care, they'd all die, and Max and his boys would too if they didn't listen to him, and that was gospel as far as he was concerned.

They had no idea what was coming, that much was clear, otherwise, they wouldn't have bothered with Simon's dog and pony show in the first place. It was just an excuse for Park to show his ass and for Sadie to show her teeth. All they wanted to talk about was Max, and Patrick's "suspicious" death at his boy's hand, if not necessarily Max's behest.

Fuck Patrick. They all wanted him dead, they were all just too self-righteous to admit it, so they pointed the finger at Max when what they should have been doing was planning their own funerals because they were all. Missing. The point.

Which was: the hell with Max. If they were smart, they'd all lay low and let the Reverend kill Max and lay waste to the rest of them, and divvy up his territory when it was over. This "diplomatic" bullshit was exactly that, and they all knew it. It was a smoke screen to hide what they really wanted, which was to turn Max into their little whipping boy for Patrick's murder and give him a slap on the wrist for doing what they all wanted but were too much of a pussy to do themselves, which was kill Patrick.

This was all about territory, they could say it was about Patrick but they didn't give a shit about Patrick, no one did, not even Max.

The Reverend's timing was almost too convenient. Patrick's murder and his return to the west coast for the first time in a decade came within five years of the next Shift. Typical that Sadie and Park would try to use Max's neck as a stepping stone to make a power grab during the unrest.

God, he hated vampires.

The bus slowed down as it came to the exit, and out of the corner of his eye, Raymond saw Lydia sit up like a bird dog. He let out a prolonged sigh. "What?" He asked.

They were sitting directly behind the driver so Raymond could be closest to the door, which was also why he was sitting in the aisle seat instead of Lydia. Lydia took the window seat without complaint, which as far as he was concerned, was her best quality, but he hadn't seen her look out the window once the whole time.

She leaned forward, reaching over the front of their seat to tap the driver on the shoulder. "This is the wrong exit," she said quietly, but not to Raymond. If he didn't know better he'd say she looked panicked. She touched the driver's shoulder to get his attention. "Excuse me, sir?"

"Don't talk to him." Raymond sank lower in their seat, groaning loudly with his head voice. Great, now he was going to talk to them for the rest of the ride. "I can't take you two anywhere."

"What?" The bus driver could almost see Lydia without turning his head, and he met her eyes briefly in the rear-view mirror. Raymond thought he seemed surprised that Lydia was talking to him, but no one was more so than Raymond. She'd been sitting in complete silence the whole time except to correct him, with an unpleasant look on her face that rivaled his own, so it came as a shock to hear her address the driver with such an effortlessly sincere tone of voice.

"This is the wrong exit."

"I know that," the driver said. He had a mustache that looked like a push broom that wiggled when he talked. "I gotta get gas."

Unable to stop himself, Raymond incredulously asked: "You didn't get gas before we left?"

The bus driver glanced at him in the rear-view mirror but addressed Lydia only, perhaps he, like most people, erroneously assumed that he was Lydia's unpleasant adolescent son and just ignored him. "The fella who usually drives this route called in sick last minute. We run a tight schedule," he pronounced it shed-jull. "just didn't have time."

Ignoring Raymond's now audible groaning, Lydia asked: "How long will it take?"

The driver lifted his baseball cap and scratched the top of his balding head absently. "'Bout fifteen minutes or so I figure, won't take long, and we'll be back on the road before you know it, ma'am."

"Thank you." Lydia leaned back again and didn't say anything else.

Raymond glared at her out of the corner of his eye as their bus pulled into the gas station. None of the humans on the bus seemed to notice or care, most of them were asleep given how late it was, and only one or two of them got off the bus to stretch their legs or pee while the driver pumped gas. Raymond, Lydia, and Luther remained in their seats, and Raymond stared petulantly out the window over Lydia's shoulder.

A brassy brown station wagon was parked next to them. The left front tire was a donut, and the back of the car was covered in bumper stickers, the only one of which that wasn't too faded for him to read had a cartoon owl on it and said: "Give a hoot! Don't pollute".

"Ugh."

The driver's side door was open, but Raymond couldn't see the driver. It was almost like he was daring someone to try to steal it.

Raymond thumped his forehead on the back of the seat in front of them, sighing. This was a waste of time. He was sitting here reading bumper stickers while Dutton was on his way to Santa Carla right now, and the longer they sat here, the likelihood that his imminent death was getting more imminent by the second increased. "This is ridiculous." He said, squeezing the top of the seat with both hands. Lydia didn't comment.

It felt like an eternity, which when put into the perspective of him being a vampire, said a lot. It felt like an eternity and an eternity had a baby and he just watched it drive off to college in that stupid fucking station wagon. Fear sat in his empty stomach like an anchor, but it was only ten minutes before the bus driver returned.

"Alright folks," finally, Raymond thought. "we got a full tank and about fifty miles to our destination. Get some sleep and I'll try to get you there as quick as I can. Next stop, Santa Carla."

If Raymond's heart could beat, it would be racing.

Thank you for reading.

I had originally intended to wait at least a week after the prologue to put up the first chapter, but I was too excited to wait. There will be a gap before the next chapter is posted, but I hope this first chapter will be enough to tide you over until then.